You hurled the glass to the table. It shattered into a flower of water, with a crackling multitude of shards for sepals. You stood upon that table. It creaked beneath your weight. God had half-stood to stop you when you sank to your knees on the glass; you kneeled into obeisance on the razor-sharp fragments, pressed your palms down into the shrapnel, and you folded yourself into wet and bleeding penitence before him.

He said, “Harrow, no.” He was distraught. He said, “Please—Harrowhark, I’m sorry, I have obviously said something immensely stupid—I do that, eh—I never wanted to hurt you.” He said, “Ten thousand years, and I am still such a fool.”

You might have told him of the traitor. Instead you said: “I broke into the Locked Tomb.”

After a moment God said, “You did not.”

“The wards to the stone were easily bypassed,” you said. “The line of Reverend Mothers and Reverend Fathers has been responsible for their upkeep for years. The barriers and gates beyond were more difficult. I was nine years old when I began, and ten by the time I could traverse the shaft. I spent a whole year working on nothing but those locks. When I came to the blood ward on the stone, the ward of the tomb-keeper, I did not know how to pass. It remains the most complex piece of magic I have ever seen. It was my first vision of the Necromancer Divine … but one day when I was ten years old I decided to end my own life, Lord, and sometimes I think it was that which let me cross the tomb-keeper’s gate. I opened it; I saw the saline water that laps the stony shore, and I walked into the sepulchre. I have seen the Tomb and I have looked upon your death. My parents killed themselves over my heresy. I saw what lies within, and I will love it beyond my own entombing. I— Did I sin, Lord? Did I kill two of my fathers that day?”

You were panting tiny, sharp puffs of breath from the back of your throat. You knelt on the broken glass on the flat table before him, damp with blood and water; you did not weep, but only because you no longer knew how.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses could only have been quiet for five seconds. To you, it felt like a hundred thousand years.

And then he said, very gently: “No, you didn’t.”

You pressed your face into the surface of the table, and you closed your eyes so violently that the pressure stung your brows and cheeks. No star hung so still as you did then, at the end of its hard hydrogen burn, breathlessly waiting to slough off its outer layer.

And he said, “Harrow, whatever you thought you did, you didn’t.”

“I opened the outer door.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I went up the passage.”